Strictly speaking, no. As the fourth graf suggests, the trip was "revealed" in (ahem) 2013. (Fox, usually better at chronicling the usurper's hijinx, caught up the following day, though it had borrowed a precede from the Daily Caller earlier.) Perhaps we meant the cost had been revealed?... The GAO report was requested by Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

The black guy's playing golf again

How are we going to shift the focus of the campaign back to those all-important policy issues, The Washington Times?

A “boys’ weekend” of golf with Tiger Woods in 2013 was fun for President Obama, but it was a triple-bogey for taxpayers.

The Government Accountability Office reported Wednesday that the departments of Defense and Homeland Security spent more than $3.6 million in travel costs and other expenses for Mr. Obama’s getaway weekend with Mr. Woods and other golf partners at an exclusive resort in Florida.

And how did this come to light?

... The performance audit, which took about 20 months to complete, was requested by Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican. The report said the true costs of the president’s golf weekend cannot be known because some of the Pentagon’s expenses are classified.

... “At a time when the government was tightening its belt to prepare for sequestration, President Obama had such little disregard for the taxpayer that he spent millions of dollars to play golf with Tiger Woods,” Mr. Barrasso said. “This arrogance is par for the course for the Obama administration.”

And how do you conclude a story like this?

... Mr. Obama has played more than 300 rounds of golf during his presidency, the vast majority of them on courses in the immediate Washington area.

How will The Washington Times look when white people reclaim the White House? Let's see if Thursday's online edition holds any clues:

Eyes 1, Brain 0, top of the eighth

Hillary Clinton’s
confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading
American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course
to win the US election in 12 days.
The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that
voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting
that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Hillary Clinton’s confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course to win the US election in 12 days. The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Oh.For more on the headline-countdown effect, let's flash back to earlier in the week:

It's a wonder some people even manage to crawl out from under the bed, isn't it?

Hillary Clinton’s
confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading
American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course
to win the US election in 12 days.
The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that
voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting
that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Hillary Clinton’s
confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading
American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course
to win the US election in 12 days.
The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that
voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting
that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Hillary Clinton’s
confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading
American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course
to win the US election in 12 days.
The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that
voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting
that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Hillary Clinton’s
confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading
American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course
to win the US election in 12 days.
The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that
voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting
that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Hillary Clinton’s
confidence could cost her the US presidency, according to a leading
American political scientist who claims that Donald Trump is on course
to win the US election in 12 days.
The warning comes amid concerns from the Clinton campaign team that
voter turnout will yet prove critical, despite many polls suggesting
that the Democratic candidate is ahead of her Republican rival.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Modern castle magic

An article on Oct. 9 about Art Deco Los Angeles quoted incorrectly from comments by the author Marlyn Musicant about the design of Union Station. She said that by utilizing bronze chandeliers, the architects wanted “a more modern influence,” not “a more Spanish influence.”

Here's the offending paragraph, in its corrected form:

“The architects wanted to go with a more modern influence,” Ms. Musicant added, “so instead of utilizing wrought-iron chandeliers, the designers went with bronze chandeliers.”

Some corrections set the mind at ease (next time we'll look up any assertion about Mount Everest; we'll never annoy "Star Wars" fans again; it's Edgar Allan Poe, three A's). Others leave you wondering whether anything else in the quotation actually happened as reported. Guess which kind this is?

A department spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross, said
the destroyer ship USS Decatur conducted the transit operation near the
Paracel Islands. He said it was done "in a routine, lawful manner
without ship escorts and without incident."

Let's not entirely let the AP off the hook. If "drawing Chinese condemnation" is supposed to go with "warship passed through waters claimed by China," the attribution is badly placed. (Since the US and China seem to agree on the basic sequence of events, we could simply leave it until the second graf.) And jargonizing isn't a sign of a healthy, independent press. File "conducted the transit operation" with "executed a search warrant"; if the cops searched a house, say so. But the hed is solely Fox:A Chinese defense ministry statement called it "a gravely illegal act"
and "intentionally provocative." The Chinese navy sent a guided missile
destroyer and an escort vessel that "spotted and verified the American
ships and warned them to leave," the statement said.How we got a "'gravely' act" out of that is a question for the ages (though with Halloween at hand, maybe we could ask Sir Graves Ghastly). How we got the morning's top story is a different matter. Fox doesn't seem to know that this is the sort of thing that big powers do sometimes. If China puts up a "no smoking" sign at the Paracels, it should probably expect the occasional destroyer to stand next to the door and blow a little smoke inside. Which seems, literally, to be what got Drudge so excited last week:

Funny, whoever's taunting whom, it's still a sign of the Kenyan usurper's fecklessness. What do you say, Fox commenters?Read more »

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Not so not fast

How are things with that wave of migrants, Nation's Newspaper of Record?An article on Sept. 20 about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s acceptance of blame for her party’s losses in German regional elections quoted incorrectly from comments by Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who said many Germans felt threatened by the influx of migrants last year. She said, “To many, the German state appeared not to be capable of handling this wave of migrants” — not “ ... not to be capable of not handling this wave of migrants.”

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Stop press!

While the media started asking critical questions about The Clinton
Foundation when Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid last year,
newly published emails show Chelsea Clinton was digging deeper into the
foundation's dealings as far back as 2011.

... In nearly four-dozen emails from October 2011 to
February 2012, Chelsea Clinton’s sometimes-abrasive relationship with
her father’s top confidant and other key Clinton aides is on full
display.

A mere 14 paragraphs later:

Then Band’s growing frustration spilled out.

“I don’t deserve this from her and deserve a tad more
respect or at least a direct dialogue for me to explain these things,”
he wrote. “She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to
do but create issues to justify what she’s doing because she, as she
has said, hasn’t found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.”

Emails published by WikiLeaks on Monday show Chelsea Clinton was
worried about a consulting firm that was founded by former aides to Bill
and Hillary Clinton as she clashed with fellow employees of the Clinton
Foundation.

..."She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has
nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she's doing because
she, as she has said, hasn't found her way and has a lack of focus in
her life," Band said of the former first daughter's criticisms.

Monday, October 17, 2016

'We define first and then see'

See if you can guess the morning's top story over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:WikiLeaks
said Monday that its founder Julian Assange’s Internet link was severed
by a “state party” and that “appropriate contingency plans” had been
activated.

The website’s announcement came hours after it
published three cryptic tweets. The messages referenced Ecuador,
Secretary of State John Kerry and the United Kingdom’s Foreign
Commonwealth Office. Each tweet was matched with a string of numbers.What could that mean, do you suppose?Gizmodo
noted that the 64-character codes sparked a whirlwind of rumors that
the 45-year-old Assange had died. Rumors on Reddit and Twitter said the
numbers triggered a so-called “dead man’s switch,” which could be
enacted in case Assange did die. Gizmodo reported that such switches do
exist.

WikiLeaks hasn’t tweeted anything else about Assange’s Internet access or how it may have been “severed.”Read more »

Tyrannosaurus regina

How's that chicken tetrazzini treating you, Nation's Newspaper of Record?An article on Oct. 2 about chicken tetrazzini misstated part of the title of a play in which the actor Vincent Price appeared in the 1930s. It was “Victoria Regina,” not “Victor Regina.”

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Who's gonna read the second paragraph?

Every now and then, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network just flat-out makes one up:Top Hillary Clinton aides were upset a Muslim man was publicly named
as the shooter in a 2015 massacre that left 14 people dead, and a
longtime Clinton confidant even expressed regret that the terrorist
wasn’t a white man, according to purported emails released by WikiLeaks
on Sunday.

... The email chain began on Dec. 2,
when digital operative Matt Ortega forwarded a tweet from MSNBC host
Christopher Hayes that named one of the shooters in the San Bernardino,
Calif., attack as Sayeed Farook. Consultant Karen Finney forwarded the
email to Podesta, commenting, “Damn.”

It's a little bit of a stretch to assume "upset" from that sequence, but the pivot foot is still down.Podesta responded: “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”

It's hard to [sic] a hypothetical, but that's not the point. All he mentions here is a name: not whether a white Christopher Hayes was preferable to a black Christopher Hayes, or former Harvard student Christopher Hayes, or crazed Vietnam veteran Christopher Hayes, or the lot of them. It isn't there. Fox is -- what's that L-word? Right. Lying. Not exaggerating, or ignoring the context, or inferring a worldwide conspiracy from a stray Arabic number in an elementary school classroom. Just lying.Why lie? A couple of possible explanations. The emails have to be the lede, even if they aren't very interesting.* The story fits into the broad category of stories that ought to be true, even if they aren't. (Especially if most of the newsroom really does think white guys are an endangered species.) And -- OK, let's go to the newsreel on this one:Hildy: Well, honey, I did that. Right there in the second paragraph.Walter: Who's gonna read the second paragraph?

Hillary Clinton’s aides and supporters expressed concern about public perception of the Clinton family’s charitable enterprise, with one left-leaning pundit writing that Clinton seemed unaware of the “danger” of her “money problem,” according to purported emails disclosed by Wikileaks on Sunday.You can see why those things don't have much of a shelf life.

The story is credited to the Washington Examiner, where the lede is a hair different:Bill Clinton suggested this week that GOP nominee Donald Trump's base comprised mostly "rednecks."

By their prescriptivism shall ye know them, but the question here is how we got from what the former president said to the Examiner hed:

... to Fox's "new tag for Trump fans." Here -- according to the Examiner -- is the quote itself:"The other guy's base is what I grew up in," the former president said
during a campaign stop in Fort Myers, Fla. "You know, I'm basically your
standard redneck."

By the time things reach Drudge, of course, the circle is unbroken:

I suppose there has to be some way to pass the time while waiting for the next explosive email shoe to drop: OMG Clinton thought it would be nice to "see Putin be less defensive toward a relationship with the United States so that we could work together on some issues"! OMG Clinton staffers questioned Master Murdoch's ostentatious piety! OMG somebody called Chelsea a "spoiled brat"! The overall prize, I think, goes to culture war correspondent Todd Starnes:Mr. President, I know some rednecks. And you, sir, are no redneck.

Todd? So do I, and yes he is. And if you bring up sweet tea and the Bible again, people might start asking why you and your stablemates listened when Master Trump told you to stop covering a massive slow-onset natural disaster.

Friday, October 07, 2016

Limping, barreling, hammering

TAMPA,
FL — Speaking to supporters in Tampa, Hillary Clinton says climate
change is “wreaking havoc on communities across America.” Clinton warns
that Hurricane Hermine “is not the last one that’s going to hit Florida
given what’s happening in the climate.” She says, “When it comes to
protecting our country against natural disasters and the threat of
climate change, once again, Donald Trump is totally unfit and
unqualified”.Drudge, of course, was just getting warmed up for Friday morning:

The real fun -- and please don't think we're minimizing the risk posed by a very dangerous tropical cyclone* -- is in the stories linked from the ear:

Thursday, October 06, 2016

No, but thanks for asking

A potentially legendary photo-bomber has stolen the spotlight from a bald eagle nest live cam in Beulah.

Social
media is abuzz recently with a clip from a camera mounted to a tree
near the Platte River State Fish Hatchery, about 30 miles west of
Traverse City, placed there to highlight a bald eagle nest. In the
footage, baby eaglets peep in the nest, while on the forest floor below,
walks through what some think is Bigfoot — the never-confirmed,
mythological man-ape-like creature that's spawned many an unwatchable
cable TV night-vision camera show.

Monday, October 03, 2016

That's one way of putting it

It does indeed appear that something has gone wrong. One hopes it's not the kind of something that leads to free passage in the unheated cattle car to Siberia for the unfortunate Fox staffer who thought the story looked like it might be "news."